And Psithyrus beat his time.
Tick.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Then a tumble. A wave of air. Moisture. A warm surface.
I burrow.
Tastes… rich. Follow the air in the blood. Children growing. They need food. Follow the air. Find somewhere tasty.
Bite. Hang on. Wait.
Give birth.
Tick.
So many children. We’re talking. Or is it just that we are? It’s hard to tell. I can send signals, and they can respond. Make the blood smell different, make where we’ve bitten glow.
A sudden flood of noise. Not us. We smell fear. Can’t have that.
We suck it in and release a bit of calmness, and a lot of children.
Soon we’ll be all over this place. We’ll talk and talk and talk.
Tick.
Well now. I’m sure that the host is trying to kill me off. Some of me keep dying to a chemical surge of some kind. But when it peaks I release fear, interfere with a couple of what look like important signals. Soon enough they’ll stop trying. This is my house now.
I can push some buttons, see what responses I get. It’s odd. Tweak a bit over here and a bit over there lights up. Fear makes some bits glow like a beacon, but when the right signals hit the right bit of flesh it makes the host calm right down. I’ll have to remember that. If I can just find the right signals…
Wait.. Some of me just got thrown out of the host, I think. I can feel them fading into the distance…
Tick.
I found some other hosts. I’m not quite as well established in them, of course, but I can feel myself connecting together, as I did in this host. It’s just a bit fainter.
I’ve found the best set of signals to make the host calm down. Looks like it triggers a stored set of chemical responses. A memory, if you will. I can only imagine what they were going through while I was getting to this point, memories firing off randomly with no real reason. They must have thought they were going crazy.
Ah.. That explains them trying to kill me. Well, let’s not have that. I can find my way around my other hosts a lot better now. Find the same responses a lot quicker, prompt the same memories. That should (unless I very much miss my guess), stop them trying to kill me. I can quietly get around, get stronger.
Yeah. Sounds like a plan.
Tick.
Turns out my hosts work together. Quite a lot like me, but at the same time nothing at all like me. They aren’t one creature, they only affect each other when they’re fairly close-to (with a few exceptions I haven’t worked out yet).
I’ve hijacked quite a few hosts now, mostly the elderly and infirm, full of memories and knowledge. There are a few younger hosts that seem to be taking care of the older ones. Seems like a waste of resources to me, but hey, every little helps!
I think my first host is starting to fail now, but I’m getting what I need. Language, for example. Such a complicated a way to communicate, but they can’t feel each other like I do, so I suppose it makes sense. I haven’t quite worked out how language matches memories yet, but I’m getting there. For example the memory that helped calm my host down was one of her… husband? He made birds.
Wait. That doesn’t make sense.
Give me a second.
Tick.
My first host died. Everyone in the nursing home thought it was old age. Dementia.
Oops.
I’ve spread pretty far now, some of me has gone much further than I can feel, which is probably OK if I can link up again. I’ll just keep building up somewhere else. I’m sure I’ll be fine.
See, the thing is that some of the hosts are full of strange memories, getting ‘trains’ out of the ‘mountains’ to the rest of ‘Europe’, or getting a ‘flight’ in a ‘plane’ back to ‘Zurich’. There are so many contradictions! Trains, training, trainers, flights, flies, flee, planes, hyperplanes, physics, physicians…
Bluh. Can I go back to being an unthinking spore? All I had to worry about then was calming down an old lady with memories of her husband making clocks.
Or.. Was that her visual cortex..
Hang on.
Tick.
I may have miscalculated here.
It seems that I’ve been calming people down and simultaneously making them hallucinate. Clocks. To be more specific an 8 day movement, hand carved chalet style cuckoo clock.
I got part of me back from a conference in Geneva on the effects of bacterial pathogens on the elderly (go figure), and not one of them questioned the corridor full of clocks on the way in. Good job really, because isolated little clumps of me will be headed back to Singapore and New York and London and who knows where else by now, and they’ll all be thinking that the best way to stop a host fighting back is to make them think of an 83 year old grandmother’s memory of a cuckoo clock.
Somewhat ironic really. Three more of my hosts just failed, and if I’m spreading as the same rate everywhere else as I am here then one thing they don’t have is time.
Tick.
